Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction by Allen Guelzo (self help books to read TXT) 📕

cut a far wider swath through the racial power structure of the South than the numbers may at first suggest. All told, this means that eighteen out of every one hundred Confederate soldiers never came back, three times the death-rate of the Union army. It is almost impossible to estimate how many Southern civilians may have died war-related deaths, due to the disruption of the war and dangers of being a refugee.3

Along with these lives, a large portion of the prewar Southern economy vanished into the smoke that hung over the devastated Confederacy. Although embittered Southerners were wont to blame most of their losses on Yankee pyromaniacs, the single biggest item in the bill was caused simply by emancipation. Of the $7.2 billion worth of Southern property listed in the 1860 census, $2.4 billion existed in the form of slaves, as the chief capital investment of cotton agriculture. The Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment simply erased the slave assets of the South. A second blow was fiscal in nature, as the money that Southerners had converted into Confederate bonds and notes disappeared the moment it became clear that the United States government had no intention of assuming any part of the Confederate government’s debt obligations. Only after these losses came the destruction of physical capital: as much as 43 percent of the South’s non-slave agricultural assets were destroyed by the war. By 1865, a third of the cattle, horses, and mules of the South were gone, and in the absence of slave labor to till the soil, Southern farm values fell by half. In Alabama, per capita wealth among white farmers fell to one-sixth of what it had been in 1860. In Georgia, one-quarter of the state’s rail lines were piles of useless, twisted iron, and the state controller general helplessly estimated that “almost four-fifths of the entire wealth of Georgia had been destroyed or rendered unproductive.” Even here, though, the plundering of agricultural property included that done by Confederate impressment officers as well as by Yankee foragers.4

By 1870, the accumulated value of all Southern property stood at only $2.05 billion, which means (after wartime inflation is factored in) that the war cost the South between $5 billion and $8 billion. The irony in these figures is that if Southerners in 1861 had accepted the kind of slave buyout plan Lincoln devised for Delaware that November, then, for the $6.6 billion the Civil War cost the entire nation, every slave could have been freed at market value, with enough to fund the purchase of forty acres and a mule for every slave family, and still have had $3.5 billion in hand as a fund for promoting black economic entrance into a market economy.5

It has long been a truism that the Civil War ruined the South but became the maker of the Northern industrial economy; that, in turn, has generated suspicious comment that the war was actually a deliberate mechanism of Yankee capitalists and industrialists to seize control of the republic from its agrarian patriarchs. But the wastage of the Southern economy in the postwar years was not entirely a product of the war, nor was the explosion of Northern industry. Southerners had pegged their prewar economic success to cotton, and believed devoutly that King Cotton would force the European nations to intervene on their behalf. Too many of them had spent too much time in an environment in which the laws of demand—whether of slaves or commodities—allowed them to ignore the complementary laws of supply. And sure enough, even before the War had come to its first major battle, cotton consumers in Europe were busy shifting to other sources of supply. The viceroy of Egypt “with a laugh” assured the Confederate propagandist Edwin De Leon, “If your people stop the cotton supply for Europe, my people will have to grow more and furnish them.” And so they did. India doubled its exports of cotton to Britain; Brazil quadrupled its cotton exports; Egypt was shipping more than half a million bales to British cotton mills by 1865. Cotton remained king; it simply transferred its throne.6

But war rarely acts as anyone’s friend, and if it was no friend to Southern cotton growing, it was also no friend to Northern industry. The rate of commodity growth actually slackened in the four postwar decades, and manufacturing showed a boom only in certain narrow sectors. In a few places, industrial employment rose at giddying speed: in Chicago, it quadrupled between 1860 and 1870, and tacked on another 50 percent of 1870 employment numbers over the next decade. But in Philadelphia, the economic impact of secession and government war contracts was broad rather than deep; some Philadelphia manufacturers made sizable personal profits out of war contracting, but the overall structure of the Philadelphia economy, not to mention its politics, underwent little reorganization during the war. In Pennsylvania’s rural Chester County, the war multiplied land values and boosted the Phoenix Iron Works in Phoenixville to a competitive level with British ironmakers. But it also starved to death the cotton and woolen mills that had been the original foundation of Northern industry in the first half of the nineteenth century, and wiped out the small-scale iron mills that once occupied the banks of Chester County’s Brandywine Creek. As much as Northern industrial muscle was vital to providing the weight of arms and material that gave the Union armies victory, much of its astounding output was channeled to the production of articles, from siege guns to uniforms, that had no peacetime value or market. Few of the officers and bureaucrats who learned how to manage large-scale production and distribution were ever able to translate those lessons into the peacetime economy.7

If there was any segment of Northern industry that enjoyed a boost from the war, it was the railroads. No single technological innovation of the nineteenth century was dearer to the heart of old Whigs and new Republicans than the railroad, and no industry meant more to the support